Flight of the Wild Swan

By Melissa Pritchard

A majestic novel of Florence Nightingale, whose courage, self-confidence, and resilience transformed nursing and the role of women in medicine

Sweeping yet intimate, Flight of the Wild Swan tells the story of Florence Nightingale, a brilliant, trailblazing woman whose humanity has been obscured beneath the iconic weight of legend. From adolescence, Nightingale was determined to fulfill her life’s calling to serve the sick and suffering. Overcoming Victorian hierarchies, familial expectations, patriarchal resistance, and her own illness, she used her hard-won acclaim as a battlefield nurse to bring the profession out of its shadowy, disreputable status and elevate nursing to a skilled practice and compassionate art.

In lush, lyrical detail, Melissa Pritchard reveals Nightingale as a rebel who wouldn’t relent—one whose extraordinary life offers a grand lesson in inspired will.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781954276222

Melissa Pritchard

MELISSA PRITCHARD is the author of twelve books, including a biography and collection of essays. Her first short story collection, Spirit Seizures, won the 1988 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Carl Sandburg Award, the James Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book of the Year. A five time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and consistently cited in Best American Short Stories, Melissa has published fiction and non-fiction in such literary journals, anthologies, textbooks, magazines as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Agni, Ecotone, The Gettysburg Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Nation, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. A recent Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, Melissa’s newest novel is Tempest: The Extraordinary Life of Fanny Kemble (2021). www.melissapritchard.com.

Book preview

PART ONE

I Am Educated

Lea Hurst

Derbyshire, England

1827–1836

Ensnared

I RUN TOWARD THE PITEOUS CRIES, my boots weighing me down, small stones I’ve collected for Papa clatting against one another in my pocket.

It had not been my intent to rescue a thing. In the library this morning, Papa had let me hold a new fossil from his collection, an ammonite from Lyme Regis. When I’d asked how I might find fossils of my own, he suggested I first scout the woodlands, develop an eye for unusual stones. Father’s library, an oak-paneled room smelling of tobacco, cloves, and bergamot, of dust and dead insects clinging to heavy folds of maroon drapery, is a shadowy, crammed place where rare books are piled up, haphazardly shelved, left open on glass-topped naturalist’s cabinets. Besides the nursery I share with my sister, it is my favorite of the many rooms at Lea Hurst. Setting the ammonite back in its precise place amid a neat row of labeled fossils, Papa added, After you’ve found your stones, Flo, bring them to me; then you may choose from among my Midlands brachiopods.

I have collections of coins, seashells, wax dolls. I’ve a cemetery trove of harvest mice, a baby wren, pink-skinned and naked of feathers, a blackbird, two halves of a grass snake, a natterjack toad, a striped brown lizard. Papa collects hundreds of rare books, plant and insect specimens, fossils. I covet his Jurassic ammonite from Lyme Regis, its green-tinged, coarsely pitted spiral.

So, on the governess’s day off, when Parthe and I are meant to be resting before tea, I get up. Making as little sound as possible, clutching my boots to my chest, I steal down the back stairway, servants’ stairs we are never to use, drag open the iron-studded door, slip into the bleached glare and chapel-like hush of a Sunday afternoon in Derbyshire. On the granite steps, I lace up the iron-lined boots—because my ankles are weak, I am made to wear them—and set off down one of several footpaths winding deep into Lea Hurst’s woodlands.

Searching the ground among oaks, birch, sweet chestnut, and spruce, I choose three gray striated stones, drop them into the pocket of my day dress. Once I show him these, I will be able to choose from among Papa’s brachiopods, mollusks millions of years old. Pushing strands of hair back from my hot cheeks, I hear it, a cry of injury. Hear it again. A creature, in distress, not far from me. The cries are high-pitched, monotonous. For an instant, I long for the somnolent peace of the third-floor nursery, the large open windows overlooking the river Derwent. But the sound draws me on.

Its injury is worse, more fascinating than anything I have seen. A hare, fully grown, caught in a poacher’s snare. Sensing my presence, it goes still. Even in its agony, it wants not to be found.

Dropping to my knees, I stare into its amber eyes, stretched wide with fear. We regard each other. Though I am only seven, I see its creature soul.

Shhh. Poor thing.

Twine, wire-thin, hardened with wax, has torn the skin off its back legs, cut into its flanks, torn open the white-furred abdomen. I study, as if dreaming, the bloody muscle, white bone, sinew. The hare kicks once, with little force. Sinks onto its side, unmoving, one slightly protuberant eye steadily regarding me. A wild creature with tall, tapering ears and tawny, stippled fur, powerful hind legs meant to bound at great speeds across fields and woodlands, unharmed until now.

I work to free him from the sharp twine, drag the petticoat from beneath my dress. Wrapping the maimed animal in its muslin (a use for the stupid thing!), I struggle to my feet, return to the footpath. Papa’s stones, the size and weight of chestnuts, shift against one another in my pocket.

Blood, red and warm, seeps through the petticoat. Stepping out from the woodland’s edge, I see my sister running toward me. Farther off, standing in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, scowls our nurse and Sunday cook, Mrs. Gale.

Parthe dashes up, her blond hair plaited into two skinny ropes.

What have you got, Flo? Gale is very angry. You have run off and frightened us.

I found him in a snare. I’m going to save him.

Screwing up her face, Parthe lifts the blood-soaked hem of the petticoat. A hard little expression of disgust.

Flo. It’s dead. Ugh, your petticoat! Mama will be so mad with you.

Mrs. Gale trundles up, panting.

What have you got, naughty child? I nearly sent one of the gardeners after you. Oh my. If you haven’t got Jack Rabbit! Poor thing, snared, was it? Good as finished. Give him over; I’ve still time to turn him into Mr. Nightingale’s favorite supper. Come into the house, wash your filthy hands, change clothes before tea. A blessing it’s Miss Christie’s day off. If she saw you looking like some dirty little heathen, she’d faint away, wouldn’t she?

Before Gale can pry the bundle from me, I cradle the hare, nuzzle its warm brindled fur, stroke the rounded place between its tall, dusky ears. It smells of wild grasses and sunlight. A film slips over its eyes, a glassy, distant look. Gone.

Deep Time

Take your Hare when it is Cas’d. Cut it into little pieces, lard them here and there and with little slips of bacon, season them with a very little pepper and salt, put them into an earthen jug, with a blade or two of mace, an onion stuck with cloves, and a bundle of sweet-herbs; cover the jug or jar you do it in so close that nothing can get in, then set it in a pot of boiling water, keep the water boiling, and three hours will do it; then turn it out into the dish, and take out the onion and sweet-herbs, and send it to table hot.

—Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery (1747)

"AH, LEPUS EUROPAEUS, MRS. GALE. Blood sauce as well?"

Your favorite, sir.

Indeed. High season for hares. How did you come by it?

It was Flo! Parthe shoves her plate away. She thought to save it!

Florence? Her father looks with curiosity at his younger daughter, tucks a large white napkin down into his shirt collar. You are responsible for my favorite dish?

Mrs. Nightingale speaks kindly. Flo dear, tell us. And Parthenope, a bite at least. Mrs. Gale has gone to great trouble.

Briefly, because it is painful, I describe freeing the hare, Mrs. Gale’s taking it from me. Wonder what to do about the petticoat, stuffed beneath my bed.

Poor thing, says Mama. You tried saving a wild creature’s life. I am sorry you couldn’t.

I’m not, Mr. Nightingale says, waving his fork. Parthe, try a taste with the blood sauce. Mrs. Gale has peppered it to perfection.

I won’t! Parthe sobs. I won’t drink blood! She slides off her chair and runs from the room.

I chew on a nip of hare’s meat in dark red gravy. Delicious. Not for the first time, I wonder what is the matter with me, why things that cause my sister to cry do not bother me in the least.

Mrs. Nightingale excuses herself to go ask Mrs. Gale to fix a simpler supper for Parthe.

I found stones on my walk, Papa.

Excellent. Bring them to the library after supper, and we’ll have a look.

---

He examines my ordinary bits of rock, sets them aside, holds out three small fossils. I choose the largest.

A brachiopod, dug from a limestone quarry in Roade. How many years are you now, Florence?

Seven since May, Papa.

Well, that mollusk in your hand is millions of years old. You must imagine it coming into your possession from a place called Deep Time.

What is that? I ask.

Not a place so much as a way of looking far outside the limits of human time. Not that long ago, it was believed the world was no more than six thousand years old. Today science tells us it is far older, a fact that disturbs a great many people.

Why?

They fear science will challenge the existence of God. Call into question the truth of the Bible. Threaten all Christian civilization. I hardly agree. Science helps us know how God made this world. It is glorious inquiry, not witchcraft. Here, have all three. The others are echinoids found in glacial beds from the same quarry.

With Parthe, Papa talks of simple things. With me, it is as if I am some creature he must pour all his man’s knowledge into. As if to change me into the boy, the son he will never have.

---

In the nursery, I pull the notebook from under my pillow. Fashioned from Mama’s and Papa’s old letters, each page is folded into fours, the folded pages neatly stitched down one side. I write in the blank spaces, down the sides, at the very top and bottom. When one notebook is full, I put it in an old glove box of Mama’s and make a new one.

Beneath a pencil sketch of the mollusk, I copy the description Papa has written down for me. Brachiopod. Jurassic Age. Found by William Nightingale, 1825, limestone bed in Roade. Turning the page, I sketch the three echinoids, then, from memory, the ammonite, named after the Greek ram-horned god, Ammon. Papa has promised to take me to Dorset one day to dig for fossils. He forgets most of his promises to me; it is doubtful he will remember this one.

Beneath the spiraled ammonite, I print:

Monster

Latin: monere, to warn

I am unlike other children.

I may be, as Miss Christie says,

a monster.

Sickroom

A Drama

by

F. Rossignol (English trans: Nightingale)

PLAYERS:

Nurses: Florence and Parthenope

Grave diggers: Florence and Parthenope

Rx:

Rosalie: one tsp. sarsaparilla syrup, fourteen grains of James’s powder

Margery: two liver tonic pills taken before bed

Mai: green liniment rubbed on arms thrice weekly

Lucy: ginger plaster on chest

Ada: ginger plaster on back

Jane: beef tea, amputation right leg

Abigail: tonic pills, one every other day

Isabella: rhubarb powder with water, one tsp. every half an hour

Emily: steam vapor bath

Harriet I: green liniment

Harriet II: yellow liniment

Alice: herbal salve on flannel, to be wrapped around throat

Rebecca: flannel eyeshade for sick headache

Julia: bed rest

Amanda: cold-water bath for hysterics

Charlotte: bath with tincture of hyssop, dusted with rhubarb powder

Florence: jasmine tincture for scarlet fever

Parthenope: a tragic, terrible death

—The End—

Eighteen patients on doll-size mattresses, lying under squares of old crinoline. Eighteen heads of poured wax with hard glass eyes and stiff tendrils of brown or blond hair, eighteen pairs of miniature wax feet with painted-on black slippers, pointing heavenward. Carrying a cobalt-edged porcelain platter pilfered from the kitchen, I move from one to the next, reading each prescription aloud. On my medical tray are pills made from bread, spat on and rolled into balls, liniments and salves made from vegetable skins, lard, kitchen spices. Behind me, Parthenope holds a pewter spoon and a brown bottle of foul-smelling syrup made from soured milk and molasses.

Today all are dreadfully ill. Jane must have a leg removed. Two will die within the hour.

Why, Flo? Why must they die?

Because God wants it.

We administer salves, liniments, syrups, bread pills. Pretending to saw off one of Jane’s sawdust-stuffed, muslin-covered legs with a paring knife, I bandage the pretend stump with a bit of linen, stick my finger with the knife point, smear blood on the bandage, suck my finger clean.

Sixteen of our patients, buttoned into nut brown flannel robes sewn by Kitty, sit straight up in their beds, staring at nothing.

These we have saved.

My sister points to the last two, crinoline blankets drawn over their faces.

For those, we must put on mourning bonnets.

Why? What did they die of?

Scarlet fever took Florence. Parthenope tumbled down a well and split her head in two.

That’s cruel!

Death is cruel. One day, a child is eating gingerbread; the next, she has dropped down a well.

I’d rather play battledore, Flo.

Wearing black caps borrowed from the servants’ closet, carrying a doll apiece, we creep downstairs and out to the back end of the vegetable garden to bury Florence and Parthenope beneath handfuls of torn grass, skirts of pink hollyhock, white umbrels of water parsnip.

May we unbury them after tea?

Of course. We can be like Lord Jesus. Bring the dead to life.

Urchin

HURRY, POP, WILL YOU? This morning, Miss Christie asked to know how your essay on Christian martyrs could have been so free of mistakes. If you do not cut my hair off this instant, I will tell her why. That I wrote it for you.

Nasty thing, you wouldn’t!

I certainly would.

But these scissors are so heavy.

You’re afraid of Miss Christie, that’s all.

Does hair grow back?

Dunce. Quick, before she comes in.

Two hard, grinding bites of the shears and Parthe finds herself holding the cook’s jointing scissors in one hand, her sister’s braid, a red-gold tail detached from its bossy animal, in the other.

What shall I do with it?

Throw it out the window—what do I care?

Miss Christie glides into the nursery, a love letter from the German bank clerk tucked into her pocket. Staring from Florence to the braid, swaying like a long, fat snake in Parthenope’s hand, she shrieks.

God’s mercy, what have you done? You look like a street urchin!

Not an urchin, Miss Christie. A boy. Francis. Francis Nightingale.

Silva Rerum

SEIZING THE BRAID, STILL WARM and smelling of chamomile rinse, Miss Christie wads it into her other pocket, the one without Werner’s letter. She hasn’t the first idea what to do with it.

Sit on that chair, Miss Nightingale. Not a word until you have got the spirit of obedience.

A snort of laughter from the far end of the nursery, where Parthe is working a sampler. Enough from you, Parthenope.

Miss Christie, who is young and pretty but understands nothing of children and dislikes being a governess, turns to the worst thorn in her side. Francis, for heaven’s sake.

What is the first rule of girlhood, Florence? Obedience. And the second? Silence. Parthenope, read your sampler aloud to us. I believe it is called ‘The Danger of Delay.’

Why should I say "’Tis yet too soon

To seek for heaven or think of death?"

A flower may fade before ’tis noon,

and I this day may lose my breath.

Miss Christie allows the association of childhood and early death to deepen the springtime chill in the large unheated room.

Florence, stop pulling a face. Parthenope, turn away from your sister.

Scraping her chair around, Parthe bursts out laughing. Miss Christie, clenching her fists against her skirts, comes close to weeping with frustration. Florence, who is not rude so much as truthful and iron-willed (You were not born like other children, her father teases; you marched, full of fire and inquiry, from under your mother’s skirts), feels a slight twinge of remorse.

Sorry, Miss Christie, but I really must go my own way. You say girls must obey first and be silent second, but that would mean to stop thinking. I like thinking. I like speaking, too. There lies the trouble between us.

That morning, Miss Christie had had to abandon a classroom exercise she set great store by, assigning a single virtue to each letter of the alphabet, having Florence make up a phrase to fit that virtue. They had begun with A, Avoid Lying, It Leads to Every Other Vice, and gotten as far as E, Elevated Thoughts Energize, when Florence had laid down her pencil and balked. Pointless, she complained, adding that her hands hurt. Suffering from weakness in her wrists, she is still unable to write in anything but a childish hand when she should, like her sister, be writing in cursive. Her unfinished sampler, with its hopeless tangle of threads, (Now that my journey’s just begun, / my course so little trod, / I’ll stay before I’ll further run, / And give myself to God), lies in a troubled heap on the music room floor.

Every day brings a new affront to Miss Christie’s conventional sensibilities. Florence’s disgusting caterpillar farm in one corner of the nursery, her objection to instruction, her obstinacy in getting dressed. And now her hair all shorn off, what’s left sticking up every which way. Miss Christie herself has never rebelled. Having neither the will nor the spirit for defiance, she views her job, educating these sisters and punishing their least disobedience, as one and the same. In a letter to her mother, she admits to preferring the elder Nightingale girl. Parthenope reminds her of herself as a child, docile, eager to please, content to be doted on by adults. A butterfly nature, dilettantish, with a gift for drawing. The other, one year younger, is a monster, and on more than one occasion, Miss Christie has said so right to her sour, set little face. Stand straight. Keep still. Don’t make that face when I speak to you. Not another word. Mon Dieu, what a little monster you are!

---

Miss Christie’s little monster, I sit up late, finishing stitchwork on a new notebook fashioned from Mama’s and Papa’s discarded letters. Unlike Parthe, eager to sketch whatever she likes—her affections so broad and shallow as to be meaningless—I am compelled, despite the ache in my wrists, to write down every smidgen of life going on around me, every thought boiling up within me. Nothing is real unless I take it down, pin and straighten what I see and think into measured words, solid sentences. I have filled dozens of notebooks, each no larger than my palm. Saving them in an old glove box of Mama’s, I keep the box in my little cemetery, along with dozens of crickets and caterpillars, two grackles, a nuthatch, a baby squirrel fallen from its nest. My private thoughts, hedged round by Papa’s and Mama’s faded sentences, decaying in the earth.

On the day Mama surprises me with my first grown-up commonplace journal, bound in blue morocco leather and accompanied by a note: Dear Flo, at last—your very own cahier or silva rerum—(Latin for forest of things). All my love, Mama, I will write on its inside cover: CAHIER DE F. NIGHTINGALE. Is the Lord not with thee, wherever thou art?

Mother Twitchett

WEARING SERVANTS’ GLOVES, I polish each seashell in my collection with oxalic acid. A copy of Woodarch’s Introduction to the Study of Conchology lies open to an illustrated description of the spiral operculum (Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Mollusca; Class: Gastropoda; Binomial name: Turbo marmoratus—Linnaeus, 1758), a sea snail shell I purchased for four pence in a local shop, along with a Bulla brown bubble shell (Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Mollusca; Class: Gastropoda; Binomial name: Bulla australis—Gray, 1825) for two pence. In the commonplace book Mama gave me, dans mon cahier, I have made an alphabetized list of each of forty shell specimens. I intend to collect one hundred. My coin collection is tucked away in a cupboard. Money, man’s creation, is of less interest to me than God’s fantastical sea creatures. Each seashell has its own perfect symmetry, its unique colors and patterns through which to glimpse the mind of God.

The nursery windows are flung wide to the gray-green roar of the Derwent below. Behind me, on the Turkey carpet, Pop lolls on her stomach, flipping through A Choice Collection of Riddles and Charades.

Flo! What about this one? She reads the lines aloud.

Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye,

And a long tail which she let fly:

And every time she went over a gap,

She left a bit of tail in her trap.

I hold a dog whelk up to the light, admire its pink-and-amber roundness. Don’t know, Pop.

Needle and thread, dull wit! What about this?

Hoddy-doddy,

With a round black body!

Three feet and a wooden hat,

What’s that?

How interesting. The muted stripes on two tellins are alike, yet not. I give up.

Iron pot, silly! Cutting your hair and pretending to be a boy hasn’t made you one dot smarter than me.

Mad Peter’s Cabinet

WITH A SLIGHT SHUDDER, Miss Christie takes the slippery braid from the pocket of her dress and hands it to Mr. Nightingale.

Coiling his daughter’s plait into a large handkerchief, William Nightingale goes into his library and places it in his cabinet, a new curiosity in an exotic miscellany of inherited objects: a five-inch crocodile tooth from the Nile, a dried seahorse, a miniature female anatomical figure from Bologna, a narwhal’s tusk mislabeled unicorn horn, a glass phial of twin animal embryos preserved in spirits, a mandrake root from the Orient, a string of amber beads from Africa, the shell of an armadillo, a wampum belt made by Indians of North America, ivory sewing tools from China, a vial of red liquid collected when a terror of blood rained down on the Isle of Wight on June 19, 1177.

The cabinet and its contents originally belonged to William’s great-uncle, Peter Nightingale. A solitary bachelor prone to sodden bouts of drunkenness that led to flogging his horse over fences and across ditches in the dead of night, earning himself the local name Mad Peter, he had deeded his entire estate—2,200 acres, lead mines, cotton mills, and a sum of 100,000 pounds—to his great-nephew so long as William agreed to change his surname from Shore to Nightingale. The moment his great-uncle died, William Shore, now Nightingale, became a wealthy country gentleman free of any need or incentive to earn a living. Devoting his life to the quiet accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, he retreats into his shadowy libraries, a sea snail gone into the richly brined depths of its shell.

Iron Cage

WHAT A FINE SON FLO WOULD HAVE MADE. He watches his daughter, crouched on the dirt footpath to Cromford, absorbed in the workings of a busy anthill. Except for Mrs. Nightingale, who refused to indulge Flo’s whim, they had all called her Francis until the pretense grew tiresome and everyone forgot. Even Florence stopped badgering them. She had drawn the wrong sort of attention to herself, the amused condescension of her parents and her sister’s obnoxious teasing.

Goodness, Flo. What if I insisted on being called Percival? Or Horace? Algernon? It’s too silly. Cutting your hair and changing your name did nothing but hurt Mama’s feelings. I wonder where it went, your pretty braid?

In the dark, lying beside Parthe, I run my hands through the stiff tufts. Why must everything be about sparing the feelings of others? What an iron cage life is turning out to be!

Might as well give me all your hair ribbons, since you can’t use them.

Have them. You fiddle about with bows and curls. I’d rather go on walks with Papa.

---

Removing his cap,